Monday, October 18, 2010

GSoC Comes to an End

The Python Software Foundation supported many Google Summer of Code
(GSoC) Projects this year by recruiting mentors and supporting
projects from around the community. As the summer comes to a close, we
thought it would be a good idea to let you know how things turned out,
so we contacted a few of the participants to ask them about their
experience.

Carl Meyer from the pip project told us that "the primary goals for
the summer were setting up a continuous integration server for pip,
speeding up the tests and making them runnable without network access,
and porting pip to Python 3. The first and last got done fully, the
middle one mostly done. And Hugo Lopes Tavares closed a number of
miscellaneous tickets along the way as well."

Carl also told us that he enjoyed being a mentor for the project. Hugo
went on to join Globo.com when GSoC was over and thinks that his
experience with GSoC helped him get hired.

Laurent Gautier of the rpy2 project also enjoyed being a mentor. His
project was to get rpy2 compatible with Python 3 on the C-level and to
do some custom R graphical devices with rpy2. They were able to
complete their project.

Fernando Perez was the mentor for the IPython work done by Omar Andrés
Zapata Mesa and Gerardo Gutierrez. They worked on separate but related
projects that dealt with a multi-process model of kernel hosting for
IPython and some client software using the ZeroMQ messaging library.

Julian Habrock, the student for the PyGame project, posted his work
as he did it on a blog. He worked
on a new draw module for pygame and pygame2 with mentor, Marcus Von Appen.
Julian thought the project was fun and he learned how to organize bigger
projects and encourages other studentswho have the time and motivation to
join GSoC next year.

Let us know what your project did this summer! The Google Summer of
Code website lists many Python-related projects,
but the level of detail online is inconsistent. If you would like to
let us know what your project accomplished, please send an email to
mike at pythonlibrary dot org.

The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.